Five years after her sleazy hip-hop hit "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)" dominated the strip clubs, rapper
Khia returns with an album featuring 18 mug shots from her 20 arrests in Florida on the cover. Clever, and all a listener wants from the limited
Khia is a trashy kind of clever, but
Gangstress is a mostly misguided effort to muscle into
Lil' Kim and
Foxy Brown territory with this aspiring ghetto Grand Dame boldly boasting she's the "Queen of the South" to the point it becomes ridiculous. First off, the numerous skits are way too long and hard to understand thanks to her answering machine's poor recording quality, plus they're just not entertaining. When she poses as a Queen over flat beats, it's almost embarrassing, but when she gets freaky, there are pleasant reminders of what made "My Neck, My Back" such a great guilty pleasure. While the party numbers "Ah Ha" and "I've Been High" are fun and "Snatch the Cat Back" is the kind of trash she spits like no other, everything suffers from
Khia's decision to produce the album herself.
Gangstress sounds five years behind the times because of it, leaving
Kim and
Foxy with no worries. Fans of the dirtiest street music the South has to offer might get something out of this, but everyone else can ignore her return to the game and the incessant boasting that comes with it. ~ David Jeffries